lifebsideben

Wow, everyone wants to get gas at Costco these days, since it’s so much cheaper (today it was “only” $3.99 for 87 octane.) I tried to go to the Sunnyvale one as I needed to make a stop on the way home over there, and the line to get into the parking lot was going to take 10 minutes, let alone actually waiting for gas. So off to the one near my house, I went (Airport Blvd in South San Francisco).

It was pretty packed there, too… definitely the most folks I’ve seen there before. They closed one of the entrances so they’d have more room for lines, and I was directed by one of the attendants, to the second to last line. Fine, I pull in, OK, only one car ahead of me, then a guy with a trailer and a boat, and a couple guys at the pumps. The two guys pull out, and Mr. Boat pulls in. Hmm, won’t pull up to the front pump, huh? Great. So this is going to take longer. Mr. Boat and his buddy, we’ll call him Mr. Dinghy, jump out and try to figure out the pump. This takes a few minutes, and finally they start getting gas for the truck. Time passes. Folks in other lines are moving ahead. Finally they stop filling up the truck, and — you guessed it — start filling up the boat. This is when I get out of my car and ask them why they didn’t pull forward to the first pump. “There isn’t enough room” they say. Looks like there is, to me. There’s at least 25 feet in front of the pumps for cars to maneuver around, even if they stuck out 10 feet, it’d be fine. Grr.

OK, so, it’s a small boat. How much gas can it hold? How long can this take? Nearly 15 additional minutes, is the answer. I’m thinking this boat must hold a TON of fuel! I’m getting really impatient now, and I’m thoroughly bored both by NPR on the radio and by Valleywag on my iPhone. Hurry up already!! As I reach to honk in arggravation, they start capping up the tank on the boat. Sigh. So now the guy in front of me, and I, pull up to the pumps. The Boaties left their receipt. This ought to be good, I think, they must have spent $300 on gas. Hmm, only 24 gallons. What? Really? How can you only pump 24 gallons in 15 minutes? Lordy.

I swiped my card, pumped my less-than-7-gallons (the Prius has an itty bitty tank), and was back in the car within 3 minutes. That’s 20 fewer minutes I had with my kids tonight, thanks to the Inconsiderate BoatJerks.

Tags: bitching, Costco, gas, SFO

Normally, I like my Comcast service. I really do. I mean, it’s ridiculously expensive, yes… and I have the “triple play” (voice, cable tv, internet) so I theoretically “save” money. But usually, it’s pretty good. At least it has been fairly reliable compared to my past experience (many years ago, admittedly) with AT&T DSL, and it’s fast as all get-out for data. And the VOIP actually works, unlike Vonage or TomatoVine who should both be bankrupted as soon as possible for fraud, in my opinion.

However, last night was the exception to general Comcast goodness. Just before 10pm, Val calls down to me in the office… “the internet’s not working.” Usually, this is some wacky wifi issue on the mac, like the microwave interfering with it… oh wait, that’s right, she’s now hardwired in. Hmm. Let me check… sure enough, seems down. Check the router. The “online” light isn’t lit, but everything else is. Let’s try to reset it. Little switch on top does nothing, let’s try pulling the power cord… no dice, that’s right, I forgot. This is a VOIP modem as well, and we wouldn’t want that to die when the power went out, right? It’s got a big honking battery in the bottom. Sigh. OK, let’s actually call Comcast.

After digging up the number from a statement (paper statements, what a novelty! I guess they’re good in this case, when otherwise, everything is online and I can’t really, get online easily^*). Call them, navigate the voice menus, and “we’re experiencing difficulties in your area. there is no need to stay on the line to report this issue.” Grr.

OK, well, the cable still works at least. But yeah, no data. No voip (so no telephone). Meh. I did want to know how long this outage was actually going to have lasted by the time they resolved it, however, so I just set up a commandline to record pings: while true; do sleep 5 && date >>pings && ping -c 1 -t 5 www.google.com 2>&1 >>pings ; done and I figured I’d check the ‘pings’ file in the morning to see when it started having output. (I’m sure there’s a smarter, simpler way to do this… this was the 2-minute hackery version.)

Well, according to the file, pings started working at 1:25am. Three and a half hours Comcast data was down. That’s pretty sucky. I hope this was a major fiber cut somewhere that they dispatched everyone in the area to fix… for voice customers particularly, that’s really lousy, on a holiday night (hey, relatives can be calling! your great grandfather who served in the Big War might decide to call you from beyond the grave on Memorial Day, who knows?)

^* by “easily”, I mean, without walking upstairs. Yes, my iPhone would get me online. Yes, my 3G card would get me online. But mighty sloth, would not let me traverse the steps unless absolutely necessary…

Tags: bitching, Comcast, telephone, VOIP

Went to Maker Faire last weekend — had been wanting to go each of the last years and never quite managed to do it. Finally did, and wasn’t disappointed. It’s fairly expensive ($25/person), but well, then again I haven’t been to a State Fair lately, and in some ways it’s a similar sort of setup. Probably not really that expensive, considering all of that.

I was trying to explain to some folks what it was, and tried “family-friendly burning man”, which isn’t quite right although gets the spirit pretty accurate, and “high-tech state fair” which is close but no cigar as well. It is, to some extent, like a ham radio convention, skipped ahead a couple of generations. Well, but with (much more) weird, whimsical art. It’s hard to describe, but a fun time was had by all. Alex especially liked the Disney (sigh) section with WALL*E (ok, the $200 toy robot version coming out later this year actually does look pretty cool) and the DIY model rockets (with launches!). Oh, and the battling robots. Ohhh, the battling robots…! We saw some way cool robots that shot flames… and then promptly had their owners chastised by the local police/security folks. I think that was predictable

So anyhow, after a few hours, as we were getting pretty tired (the two kids make it a lot more unwieldy, but a lot more fun too) we sat at a bench and had some ice cream, and then headed back to see WALL*E one more time (please, Daddy, please!) When we emerged, I was checking out the t-shirts and Val ran up, “I think I lost my phone!”. After some frantic digging through the stroller compartments, we couldn’t find it. Val said she thought she might have recently lost it out of her back pocket when we were eating ice cream, so I went off to look. Nothing near where we were, and I asked the info booth if anyone had turned on in recently… they pointed me to the main info booth, they pointed me to lost and found, they said they thought “yes” one was turned on, and pointed me to security office. Off I went, halfway across the event in a sprint. After I got there, sure enough, that had one just turned in! The security officer held it up and said “is this it”? Of course, this was somewhat funny, as basically all iPhones look identical. But I unlocked it in front of her, and it was Val’s (right wallpaper, for example.) So, the Maker Faire bunch are also an honest, or at least helpful lot.

 

Tags: DIY, iPhone, Maker Faire, robots